NGC5987 (Denis Janky)

NGC5987

This is an obscure, but intriguing galaxy in Draco. It is classified as an Sb spiral galaxy. Distance estimates from different sources vary from 138.3 to 154.7 million light years. The estimated diameter is 260,000 light years. It has a visual magnitude of 11.7 and an angular size of 4.2 x 1.3 arcminutes. William Herschel discovered the galaxy on May 25, 1788 and his description was “pretty faint, very small.” I observed this in 2013 at 363x with a 20” reflector and perceived a “moderate-sized, sharply elongated halo, with a compact nonstellar core elongated in the direction of the long axis of the halo.”

But neither Herschel nor I glimpsed the unusual double dust lane with interconnected branching structure shown in the image. The intricate dust lane complex is worth studying. The inner lane nearest the core seems to encircle the core area, and a hint of the lane can be seen in my image behind the core. This inner circle of dust has a connecting branch that intersects the outer dust lane on the WSW side of the halo. (The galaxy is elongated ENE-WSW.) This merged outer arm extends to the WSW and seems to fade away with the edge of the halo. Does it circle around to the other side? Also interesting is the ENE side of the galaxy where there is a large dusty patch that - in my image - appears to be two dust lanes. It appears that another branch exits the inner dust lane and proceeds ENE on the inside of the outer lane.

This was an imaging challenge for me, and in 2019 I collected a large number of frames in varying conditions. Many frames were rejected, but I still was able to accumulate roughly 13 hours of data for this image. Comments and suggestions are welcome.

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Status	Advanced success
Started	...
Astrometry.net job	3584778
PixInsight job	IVM7FC1FYU8WPY6QYXJ4GJEW0NEN0315
PixInsight queue size	n/a
PixInsight stage	n/a

RA (center)	15h39m57s.603
RA (top/left)	15h39m50s.711
RA (top/right)	15h39m00s.223
RA (bottom/right)	15h40m04s.440
RA (bottom/left)	15h40m55s.186

Dec (center)	+58°04′50″.17
Dec (top/left)	+58°13′16″.56
Dec (top/right)	+58°01′01″.98
Dec (bottom/right)	+57°56′23″.77
Dec (bottom/left)	+58°08′36″.75

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